akuro's comments

Reading this has made me realise that I am nowhere near as literate as I think I am.

I intend on having a fruitful, storied academic career before suddenly going mad. I then would abandon everything and live on a mountain, making jam by day and writing insane ramblings on a variety of topics that nobody cares about. Eventually I'd like to graduate to becoming one of those yogis that wanders around the Himalayas butt-naked in the snow, but that might be thinking too far into the future.

I don't know, but whenever I plead with people in computational science to read Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics I'm usually met with an eye-roll.

Don't listen to my opinions, sure. But pay heed to the large number of computational chemists who do use these languages. There is a reason that professionals employ the tools that they do.

Interesting. You might be the first computational chemist I know who actually uses Rust. I know a lot of computational chemists!

Python is the big one, all of the aforementioned chemists are either intermediate or advanced in that. The runner-up seems to be Julia, which I personally have no experience with. The big guys are Fortran and C++. I prefer C for tasks of this nature, but I also shill Scheme so don't listen to my opinions on programming languages.

Best of luck on your computational chemistry endeavours!

Statistical mechanics, molecular simulation and high performance computing. That is the centre-point of nearly all of my effort in life. Nearly everything I do is based around getting a deeper understanding of this field or being able to employ my understanding more effectively.

My entire life is based around the academic route. I fell in love with a girl whose great desire in life was to settle securely in one place and have a family. To have a 9-5 job where she could spend the rest of the time in leisure with the person she loves, who presumably would also have a more laidback career. This is the opposite of the life of an academic. Stress, poor schedules and constant intense work and study. A professor who I deeply respect worked from 6AM to 11PM, 6 days a week for most of his post-doctoral years. I personally love the intensity of an academic life and working at breakneck pace is something I deeply enjoy.

Recently, I chose my scientific career over her. I suppose that I will be wondering my entire life whether I made the right choice.

I would like to dedicate my life and energy to the field of science that interests me. I would also like the opportunity to achieve something amazing with programming as my medium.

That's it, I suppose. I can't really think of anything else.

Anybody who loves statistical mechanics has surely heard of Jaynes.

Unfortunately, those who like statistical mechanics seem few and far between. :(

As someone who has taken extremely heavy doses of some very, very potent psychedelics (LSD, DMT, ketamine, mescaline and psilocybin), I am inclined to agree with you. I acknowledge that some people experience great benefits from psychedelics, but the current push to label psychedelics as mental health miracle solution doesn't sit right with me.

Make no mistake: these chemicals are not to be trifled with. People with underlying mental health issues - the poeple who would be most interested in using psychedelics - are at heavy risk of exacerbating their illnesses. Even outside of those special cases, I've seen normal people become heavily affected by bad trips. I simply don't think that there is enough scientific literature on the adverse effects of psychedelics. I also do not like the heavy focus on the "spiritual" aspects that these drugs are believed to confer: are you really transcending, or are you just so heavily intoxicated that you believe you are and no longer have the rational capabilities to convince yourself otherwise?

If I can end on just a little anecdote myself, I personally believe that heavy psychedelic use is especially counterproductive to technical/knowledge-based work. I did barely any work during the year that I was experimenting with these drugs. I was so content with my life as it was that I simply didn't feel the urge to exert myself. I was becoming soft, more predisposed to magical thinking. I believed that psychedelics had revealed unto me truths about how society should be run, how life should be and the true nature of mathematics. But I didn't know a damn thing! I just lost the inclination to actually analyse my ideas (or notions, because they barely qualified as ideas), instead being content to just accept them as they were. After a long stretch of abstinence from these drugs, I realised how worthless most of these notions actually were. I also deeply regretted the amount of time I spent taking these notions seriously, as well as the amount of time I had wasted in thinking that I had actually been experiencing any spiritual truths.

The first two paragraphs present such a blatant false dichotomy that I won't be doing myself the disservice of reading any further. If you're going to announce yourself as a philosopher in the title of your blog post, the least you can do is avoid basic fallacies.

There are too many fields in which advances in complex systems modelling will be revolutionary and I frankly don't have the knowledge to describe most those. Let me tell you about my own field, soft condensed matter physics.

A grand aim of soft matter physicists is to be able to describe biology in the quantitative language of physics. However, this is hard: biology is ridiculously complicated. However, as mentioned, we're slowly but surely making consistent progress. Advanced molecular simulation combined with machine learning appears to be an incredibly powerful approach that an entire generation of PhD students have begun to master. This has the add on effect in that it becomes easier to build theories if you have precise numerical undestanding of the physical system you're trying to study: something that simulation provides that traditional experiment doesn't.

Let's get onto the sci-fi. Imagine now that it's the 2050s and we've gotten to a point where the complexity of biology is manageable. Not fully solved: that's not going to happen any time soon. But manageable. At this point we can harness microbiology as an engineering tool. Viruses especially become active materials for construction: this has actually already happened [1], but in an extremely rudimentary way. Viruses are essentially spontaneously self-assembling molecular machines: even having a vague understanding of how they can be engineered promises a nanotechnology revolution. And that's just viruses. Imagine the other players of biology being actively used as tools for humanity: where does that even end?

We're taking our first teeny-tiny steps towards actually developing an understanding of biology in the same way we've developed an undestanding of electronics. We can't do it in the same way because the challenges are so much more tremendous, but we're honestly getting there. Ordinary lives won't so much as be changed for the better - rather, the meaning of "ordinary" life will be changed entirely.

[1] Fischlechner, M. and Donath, E. (2007), Viruses as Building Blocks for Materials and Devices.

I'm a PhD student in physics and I am really, really optimistic about how the field will be developing going forward.

People are well aware of the glamorous fields of physics: cosmology and particle physics. These are the disciplines that concern the frontiers of the very large and the very small respectively. I don't care so much about those. The frontier that I'm most interested in is the most abstract one: complexity. Physics has traditionally tackled problems that were either simple or could be made simple. Progress was made after the 1980s with the rise of solid state physics and associated attitudes towards emergence, but now? With the advent of statistical learning, advances in nonlinear dynamics and so on? Physicists are starting to tackle some insanely complex systems. Not to mention of course that computers are getting more powerful with time as per Moore's law, so simulations are really coming into their own as useful scientific approaches. Imagine the computational physicist of the 2050s, imagine the tools that she might have at hand to solve problems like the physics of life, or perhaps the phase diagrams of extremely heterogenous materials, or so on...

I can't help but be extremely excited! Here's to hoping that humanity makes it that far. :)

I'm three years into a PhD and during that time have tried some very potent psychedelics (psilocybin mushrooms, LSD, DMT and mescaline). Fearless experimentation - nothing more than science, right? :)

The change I've experienced throughout my PhD (that is, becoming a confident researcher with at least some depth to his ideas) has probably been more intense and almost certainly more long-lasting than my psychedelic experiences. Nurturing an uncomfortable familiarity with the immense limits of my knowledge, as well as regularly pushing myself to exhaustion in order to overcome those limits - inch by milimiter by angstrom - has completely transformed me as a person.

If anything psychedelics had the effect of making me believe that I had become enlightened to various true-natures-of-everything whilst providing me very little concrete understanding as to why this was the case. Much of the personal change that followed my experiences were less due to the substances and more due to my own desire for those experiences to mean something in the long run. Psychs are great and I'd recommend it wholeheartedly for those who have the courage (note: that's not to say that the classical psychedelics are dangerous - they're only dangerous for people who are scared of them). It is my opinion that one should not start believing that these things anything more than chemicals that make you feel a certain way, or help you along the path to doing so.

I am currently building a suite of software that'll allow users to easily design and run Monte Carlo simulations to solve problems in statistical physics. I am in no rush, mostly because there are probably only a few thousand people who will ever need such capabilities and it's fair to say that most of them will have enough knowledge to build their own Monte Carlo simulations from scratch.

Honestly, I'm only doing it because it's a nice way of wasting time whilst convincing myself that I'm not wasting time!

This kind of thing, whilst fun, is kinda dangerous. I'm not so sure what to make of it. I sniffed it out quickly because I have extensive experience with maths. Many people don't, because unlike me most people have social lives.

My dad still believes that the Sun makes the "Om" sound after seeing a post by some kind of Hindu nationalist on Twitter. I have told him many times, in the kindest way I can, that it's a load of rubbish. He still doesn't really believe me, mostly because the idea of the Sun making that sound is a pleasant idea that agrees with his world view.

Send this article to a hundred people and a lowball of seventy will take it as fact. Of that seventy, there will be a fraction who will believe it - or rather, internalise the notion of it - even despite being told that it is false.

In all fairness it's also very likely that I'm a just a nasty killjoy.

I went into high school as a curious kid who loved reading and enjoyed opportunities to be creative. I left high school as a nervous wreck who was terrified to apply myself in any academic situation because I'd been mocked so much - by teachers and students alike - for various failures.

It took me eight years to break out of that mindset, but I'm now doing well. In fact, my job makes heavy use of the subject that I was most afraid of due to my high school experience: mathematics. The process of becoming confident in mathematical problem solving and working through my considerable personal mental hangups was a dreadful experience. Many or even most people do not break out from the hang-ups they learn during high school, especially with mathematics.

EI have nothing but animosity for the high school system and would welcome any change that makes it less prominent in the lives of teens and young adults. I'd say that a college module system like that which the OP describes is a vastly superior alternative. I think that intellectual life and social life should be separated as much as possible, which I believe is for the most part the default setting in most universities.

Stole my comment! :)

You're right, though. I started playing chess to improve my concentration as a teenager, mostly for the purpose of improving my ability to focus on math. Then I realised that I got better at concentrating at math by... doing math problems instead of wasting my time playing chess.

According to Wikipedia: G. H. Hardy described proof by contradiction as "one of a mathematician's finest weapons", saying "It is a far finer gambit than any chess gambit: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game."

You don't even need to proof theorems in algebraic geometry to start seeing the beauty and power of mathematical thinking. Get a mental arithmetic app on your phone and spend a few months routinely practising some sums. What first appears as a dry activity will soon become a highly personal exercise in creative reasoning, of finding the best way to represent and manipulate with numbers. For example, I solve arithmetic problems visually but my friend works best by reasoning aurally (I don't get it either, but seeing as he can multipy two 4 digit numbers in seconds it works for him). I'll say that learning to multiplying large numbers in my head has done more for me in terms of mental training than chess has!